“Capitalism is bad!” If Capitalism is so bad, why is it still used in today’s modern world? Although the book The Communist Manifesto has openly addressed many issues of ‘minimum wage’ and ‘exploitation’ the gap between the “bourgeoisie” and the “proletariat” has continued to widen. So how has a book, such as this, really impacted our lives? If anything, it hasn’t! Marx first proposed these ideas nearly two centuries ago, and since that time, society, moreover the world, has managed to drift further and further away from his radical ideas.
In many of Marx’s works, namely The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, he expressed the belief that all civilizations throughout history had inevitably experienced class conflict between workers and the owners of productive property. He further argued that
In the Communist Manifesto he proposed that in every historical epoch the prevailing economic system by which the necessities of life are produced determines the form of societal organization and the political and intellectual history of the epoch; and that the history of society is a history of struggles between exploiting and exploited, that is, between ruling and oppressed, social classes. (Encarta) From these premises, Marx drew the conclusion in the Manifesto that the capitalist class would be overthrown and that it would be eliminated by a worldwide working-class revolution and replaced by a classless society.
it was this division of classes, which created a conflict that drove civilization through multiple stages of history. Marx called the middle-class owners the bourgeoisie and the workers who did the actual labor the proletariat.
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